Sid called once that afternoon to check in, but didn’t relent. Instead he listed several more books for Lucy to take home and cited numerous websites for her to peruse. “You can’t go to London unprepared. Get cracking, mio piccolo viaggiatore.”
“I can’t even guess that one,” she replied through clenched teeth.
“My little traveler.”
Still grumbling over the Italian, Lucy unlocked the door to her apartment and shouldered her way in, balancing Sid’s books on English antiques and silver, her satchel, and yet another remnant bag. She pulled off her boots, curled her toes against the cold wood floor, and opened her computer to fill the apartment with an appropriate rich and mournful melody.
“Of course you’re dead.” She yanked wilted flowers from a tomato sauce jar and shoved them in the trash. She then walked to the window and sank in front of her remnants bin, glancing at the leather armchair. “What do I do with you?” she whispered. She reached into the bin—so many gorgeous fabrics: Fortuny silks with reds, blues, and golds, embroidered and rich in texture; velvets that crushed under her fingers; chintzes with bright English flowers and that almost waxy finish that made them look alive; toiles with pastoral scenes that evoked the serenity of picnics in France, perhaps à la Scarlet Pimpernel; and plaids, stripes, polka dots, and countless other basics that added variety and provided the backdrops for so many of Sid’s spectacular creations. None of them quite right, not yet.
She searched for a gold and yellow Scalamandre that she’d saved and put it beside a new emerald silk-wool blend peeking from inside the bag. Perfect. Side by side they reminded her of the MacMillan vase, sitting atop the George III chest. Hope. She added the pair to her second drapery panel.
Her phone rang.
“You’re going on a trip with Grams?”
No hello? “James?”
“You have to ask?”
Lucy pushed the fabrics away. “No. I mean yes; I guess I am.”
“How? How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. She called Sid and no one is giving me a choice.” Lucy thought of Helen’s story, her grandfather . . . “What did she tell you?”
“That this trip is important to her, that I’m not to cause problems, and that I’m not to question you.” He rattled off his list.
Lucy smiled. “So you’re calling me, why?”
“Lucy.”
There it was again. One word, one name, filled with a world of emotions. This time she read pain, reluctance, annoyance, and disillusionment—a full paint deck of sad colors. Lucy released a slow, measured breath. “She obviously knows we broke up, that this is beyond awkward, and still she insists I join her. Sid’s on board and . . . What do you want me to do?”
“Refuse to go.”
Lucy leaned back against the wall and studied her apartment. The light over the mantel pointed right at her new bookshelves, James’s bookshelves. Other than that, it was dark. It was an empty, dark apartment, and somehow it now struck her as piteous.
Her eyes trailed the shelves, catching on book titles: Jane Eyre, Bleak House, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Moll Flanders, Frog and Toad. . . What had Helen said? I need to go back, all the way back, to go forward. And what had Sid said? Lucy reached for the moment, in the gallery, when she’d pleaded for him to make the call and he had refused. It’s the next step.
She turned back to the books . . . Swallows and Amazons . . . Beatrix Potter . . . She inhaled deep and pursed her lips to release it slow, like an athlete preparing for a race. Bowness-on-Windermere. She could do it too . . . Go back to go forward.
“Lucy?”
“I won’t refuse, James. She hired me and it’s my job.”
“This isn’t what’s best for her, Lucy. She’s sick. She has cancer.”
Lucy felt her voice come out calm. “I’m sorry. I know that and I know you’re worried about her. You all are. But I also know this, James—with or without me, she’s going to London.”
“And Haworth?”
“She wants a visit to the countryside like many trips she took with your grandfather.”
“She mentioned that you suggested the Lake District.”
“I did.” Lucy narrowed her eyes. “We’re right near there in Yorkshire and I think she’d love it. She’s revisiting favorites, and you’ve seen her curio cabinet. Beatrix Potter has been important in her life.”
“She shouldn’t be going on this trip at all. You shouldn’t be going.”
“I agree, and yet here we are.” Lucy closed her eyes. “James? What do you want from me?”
“Nothing.” He paused and she wondered what he was thinking, what he’d say next. He simply added, “I’ll take it up with Grams again. Good-bye, Lucy.”
“Hey—” The line went dead.
Lucy dropped to the floor. After a few minutes of watching car headlights bounce off the windowpanes, she reached for another fabric—a black chenille. Placed against the gold and yellow, it tempered it, transformed it, and almost overpowered it. It worked perfectly.
Saturday yawned before Lucy. She had gotten so used to spending them with James that she couldn’t think of anything to do. There were friends she could call, errands she could run, movies she could see, but nothing tempted her. Nothing. She held her coffee in both hands and stared at her glass coffee table top, resting back again on her books.
After her call with James and the “good-bye” that was too final to misinterpret, she’d removed the books from the shelves and reconstructed her book table. She had a feeling that the bookcases needed to be ready to go whenever he demanded their return. Or maybe that was her responsibility. But returning the shelves and chair rang their relationship’s death knell and she couldn’t do it. The shelves sat stark and bare. Lucy looked around. Just like everything else.
She tilted her head to examine the books that formed the table legs. She’d constructed them perfectly. One leg, childhood favorites. Those her dad had read aloud: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a compilation of Beatrix Potter’s best, Little Women, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Anne of Green Gables, The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Her eyes roamed to another leg, this one more grounded in reality, but not quite touching it: The Count of Monte Cristo, Shakespeare’s plays, Great Expectations. Hidden identities. Reversals of fortune. James had recognized that. And the third leg . . . the Brontë sisters, five Austen novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, North and South, plus a few Hardy and Eliot, and a small, squished copy of Wives and Daughters, wedged in last to make it level. Books her father had sent for birthdays or others she’d selected on her own. How much of her was stacked in that table and squished under the glass?
Lucy tapped her phone to make a call and again to disconnect it. She curled up in her armchair and tucked her legs under her, small and tight, and tapped it once more.
“Did you just call here?” Her mother’s voice sounded far away. She was talking through her earpiece.
“I did. Are you working?”
“Cleaning the kitchen. One person and I’m always cleaning the kitchen.” She laughed and Lucy heard dishes clink. “How are you?”
“I’m going to England, Mom.” Lucy waited. No dishes. No water. Silence.
“Not to find him?” A question, not a statement.
Lucy sighed. “For work, to London, but he’s there. How can I get so close and not see him? That’d be ridiculous.”
“I love your logic, but it’s flawed. He was hours away when you found the Joliet, Illinois, stamp.”
“Mom.”
“It’s a good reminder, Lucy. Statesville Correctional Facility was fairly close and you didn’t seek him out then.” The silence stretched before she continued. “He ran cons for a living, Lucy. That’s not a good profession. What makes you think he’s changed?”
“I’m not saying he has.”
“But that’s what you’re hoping, isn’t it? And somehow I doubt Sid has antique dealers or fabric sources in the Lake District.”
“No . . . The trip is a literary tour too—I’m in charge of that part, and that area is hugely significant for the client.”
No reply.
“It is.” Lucy pressed her lips together, annoyed with how high and pitchy her voice had emerged.
“And you made sure it was one of the stops.” A statement, not a question.
“What do you want me to say? I almost didn’t tell you.”
“Don’t get upset with me, Lucy.” Her mom’s words were soft and coaxing. “I don’t want to see you disappointed or hurt, and I’m sad that it sounds like you’re manipulating things to bring this about. You are so like him at times . . .”
“You say that and it’s never good. I haven’t manipulated anything. It’s not even on the itinerary.”
“Yet.”
“That’s not . . . I just want to see him. How can that be so wrong?”
“I get that, sweetheart, and it’s not wrong. But how you go about it might be and, besides, you can’t let him affect you like that—not anymore. Make your own choices. Good or bad, they matter. They affect others.”
“Believe me, I know.” Lucy bit her lip, unwilling to discuss James. She reached for a distraction. “How much do you know about Dad’s family? Dad’s dad?”
“Very little. He died when you were a baby and we only met once. I know nothing about his mother. She was the one who was English. Why?”
Lucy debated telling the story. It might help in sorting it out. On the flip side, she knew her mom’s clear, logical brain would refuse to drop down the rabbit hole with her. She would instead strongly suggest Lucy plug it. “No reason. I just wondered.”
“Are you going to tell me what’s really going on here?”
“I wish I knew.” Lucy took a sip of coffee and let the moment linger. When her mom stayed silent, she ventured further. “I’m stuck, Mom. I can’t explain how or why, but I feel it. And if I could meet him, it’d answer so many questions and I could push through. I know I could. And this trip . . . What if it’s a sign? I can’t pass this up. Can’t you understand that?”
“I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not sure it works like that. But maybe . . .” Her mom’s voice became clearer. She’d removed her earpiece. “Maybe I’ve done this wrong too and it works just as you hope. After all, if I knew the answer, I’d give it to you and we wouldn’t be having this conversation, right?” She gave a soft, reassuring chuckle.
“Right. It’s all your fault.” Lucy tried to laugh.
“So Bowness-on-Windermere, huh? Are you sure?”
“That’s what the postmark says, and I’m sure,” Lucy announced with more conviction than she felt.
“How are you going to get there?”
“Mom . . .” Lucy closed her eyes. She could see her mother’s face, hazel eyes narrowing at her as they had every time she’d caught her young daughter, her teenager, or her adult daughter in a lie or in an exaggeration or even telling a good story that wasn’t quite true . . .
“It’s a legitimate question, Lucy.”
Lucy was tired of lying, making excuses, backing out of fibs, or rewriting stories she’d already told. She was tired—so she gave the most honest answer she could. “It’s not one I’m prepared to answer.”
Lucy replayed her mother’s words the entire weekend. What had felt serendipitous, even divinely ordained, now felt tainted and coerced—and it hadn’t even been accomplished yet. She turned it over and over until the only answer she could find was to see it through. She unlocked the gallery’s front door and noted the alarm’s absence.
“Sid?” Lucy called loudly, glancing briefly at the antique standing mirror. Ugh . . . She slapped her cheeks, noting that the dark circles under her eyes seemed her most colorful and defining feature.
“Back here.”
She hurried into the back room. “You’re so early today.”
“I thought you’d be busy planning and packing so I came in. See? I’m adaptable and will survive two short weeks.”
“I didn’t doubt it.” Lucy stepped to the worktable where Sid sat hunched over a sketch. “What are you working on?”
“Designing a dressing room. It’s right outside a full walk-in closet so it’s more sanctuary than storage, but I can’t get a feel for it. My concepts are too opulent for what I sense she wants and she isn’t quite sure herself.”
Lucy leaned over. The room was colored in pinks and greens with Baroque-style heavy hanging mirrors. “What’s she like?”
“Good question. Claire Longreen is in her midforties, but her style is older. She volunteers at the library and her church, but never out front. She gives anonymously and fears she’ll be irrelevant to her children someday.” Sid looked up from his drawing. “She’s reserved, but not insecure, and she’s got a strength about her that’s very appealing, especially because she’s completely oblivious to it.”
Lucy smiled. She was used to hearing Sid talk about his clients in such terms. He listened to them, searched for their essence, and created spaces that he believed could surprise and delight them because they simply were them. She laid a hand on his back; the physical connection soothed her heart. Sid had a good heart.
“What about covering the walls and even the doors in fabric? Flawlessly clean and understated, but beautiful, warmly tactile. Something pale, like a pink or lavender silk with hints of either gold or silver. Lavender and silver, I say.”
Sid’s head snapped back. “Nothing else. No hardware, no mirrors. Instead mount everything inside panels. Simple, elegant, and yet so sumptuous. Where’d you get the idea?”
“She doesn’t sound like someone who’d want mirrors as a focal point, but they are necessary for a dressing room. And the lavender will be better—carries more gravitas than pink. You did something similar at Helen Carmichael’s. Her guest room? But she needed the frivolity of the pink.”
“I’d forgotten that. That room was such a treat. But look at you, taking it further and adapting it.” He scraped the green pencil against his chin. “You’ve got an eye for this, Lucy. An inner eye if you’d trust it more.” Sid flipped the page on his sketch pad and started anew.
Lucy tried to savor the compliment, but couldn’t. While Sid worked on the Longreen home, she tackled the list of appointments and scheduling for London. She recorded the locations and hours of bookshops, antique stores, literary sites, tourist traps—anything and everything they might want to see—in London and Haworth.
She also canvassed all the necessary details for the Lake District, telling herself again and again that the addition was valid, it held personal and literary value for Helen, and it was best to be prepared.
Lucy secured the tickets and hotels then set to compiling the itinerary for Helen’s son. Sid came and went and at some point dropped a sandwich on the corner of her desk.
“Sid?” Lucy crumpled the sandwich wrapper as she reviewed the gallery business that she was leaving behind. She waited until he emerged from another sketch. “Can you handle all the sourcing while I’m gone? I don’t want anything dropped with the time changes and I won’t be able to stay on top of everything here.”
He picked up another pencil. “I know that, but things will still get dropped. I don’t have your touch or efficiency, but we’ll survive.”
Efficiency. Disdain curled the side of Lucy’s mouth. “That’s one word for it,” she mumbled and leaned back in her chair. “ ‘Go back to go forward’ . . . A clean slate.”
“Hmm . . .?” Sid didn’t lift his head from his drawing.
Lucy called back, “Nothing. Thanks for handling all that.” She tossed the sandwich wrapper into the bin. “And thanks for lunch.”
“Hmm . . .?” Sid was deep within the Longreen home.